Is it enough in life merely to “be”, or are we called to do something with our gift of life?  Spiritual wisdom often encourages us to quit our busy-ness and mindfully experience the moment.  But satisfying work and holy purpose are also necessary to spiritual health.  If we all sit meditating who will feed the hungry, cloth the naked, house the homeless, create beauty, expand our understanding, and so on?  Is our human problem that we do too much, or not enough?  

            Last June, after thirty years in ministry, I retired.  My last Sunday was June 29.  I preached a final sermon for the Studio City church titled, “The Last Word.”

            But apparently, I wasn’t out of words, entirely.  Or entirely out of ministry.

            I am not one of those retired people who can’t ever quite quit.  Those folks who, in a few short months after the retirement party, finish all the projects around the house they were putting off, and start to get restless, then quickly go back to doing something very like what they were doing before.  I’m not one of those folks approaching retirement who reduce their hours to half time, and then to one day a week, but never completely stop.  I have no understanding of those politicians who from inertia, or ego, or lack of imagination, run for another term when they’re already well into their seventies and eighties.

            But worse than the folks who never stop working are those who do retire, however reluctantly, then, disconnected from the work that gave their life meaning, descend into malaise and, moping around the house, drive their spouse crazy.

            That’s not me.

            I was a good minister, and a happy one, for thirty years.  I did valuable work.  My congregations mostly liked me.  I didn’t please everyone, certainly, but sometimes not pleasing certain people is the best work a minister can do.  I am proud of my accomplishments.  Thirty years well spent.  No regrets.

            But I never thought that being a minister was essential to my identity.  Ministry was what I did, not who I was.  And now, a healthy age 63, and with a father who’s almost 94, there’s a good chance I might have another 30 years or so of life in which to do something different.

            I did ministry.  What else have you got?

            For me, I intend to spend the next thirty years creating art:  painting, drawing, writing fiction instead of writing sermons, composing music.

            Now that I’m freed from the necessity to earn money with my labor, I can pursue work simply because it fulfills me personally.

            But recognizing the privileged position I’m in, that I can work just for my own satisfaction now, not for a paycheck, shortly after I began this new non-career, I encountered a spiritual problem I hadn’t considered before.

How can I justify, morally, working for my own fulfillment, rather than in service to the needs of others?  No one needs me to write short stories, the way there was at least some need among some people for me to write sermons.  Finding someone who will pay you to do a job is one measure of that work having value.  If no one reads my short stories, then what worth are they?  Wouldn’t it be a better use of my time, I mean morally better, considering the burden I will place on the world’s resources as I live for the next thirty years, to spend those years giving the world back something of worth in return for what I consume?

The question is, if I live for thirty more years, what am I living for?

Retirement is a poignant time to ask that question, but if I thought that my retirement question was only relevant to me, I wouldn’t have asked Tera if I could borrow her pulpit and take up your worship time to explore the question with you.  But this isn’t just my retirement question.  It’s every living person’s question at every time of life.

What are we living for?

I mentioned my father.

He’s 93.  In a few weeks he’ll be 94.  My mother died four years ago at age 89.  A few years later my father moved from the home they shared to a skilled nursing facility

When they were working, my mother was a school teacher.  My father worked on government contracts for a sister company of the Rand Corporation.  When they retired, they volunteered as math and English tutors at the local elementary school.  They volunteered at their church.  My dad was a leader in his Kiwanis club.

Now, at 93, my dad no longer has the capacity to be the active person in his community he used to be so his life is this:  he sits in his chair; he watches game shows on TV; he reads novels; a couple of times a week he pushes his walker down to the activity room and plays bingo.

Is that enough?

You could say he’s earned enough through his lifetime of contributions to the world to take it easy now and let the world give back to him.  But is his life, now, enough for him?  We want to be useful.  A life of purpose isn’t just for what we give to others, it’s for our own satisfaction, too.  I love him and want him to live forever, but what is he living for?  To read another novel?  To play another bingo card?

But if we say that we justify our continued existence by what we actively contribute to the world, then what does a seven-year-old contribute or a baby?  Lots of people consume more than they contribute.  What worth does a bored Beverly Hills housewife contribute as she takes the car out once again to have brunch with her friends?  What am I contributing now with my modest creative endeavors?

Or, if we say, that there must be some other measure of worth we can use that doesn’t require everyone to be constantly making, producing, contributing, maybe, for instance, it’s enough for us simply to be human “beings” rather than human “doings” as the spiritual wisdom tells us, well then, fine, but who then is going to do the work necessary to support the rest of us?  Somebody has to grow the crops, and drive the trucks, and dispose of our trash, and write the novels that keep us entertained and call the bingo numbers.

There’s an old joke that sums up the existentialist philosophy of Jean Paul Sarte as, “To be is to do.”  To which his colleague Albert Camus countered, “No.  To do is to be.”

To which, Frank Sinatra shrugs his shoulders and says:  “Do be do be do.”

The spiritual questions of purpose and meaning, are the questions of “What should I do?” and “Why does it matter?”

The nihilist says it doesn’t matter, so do whatever you like, or do nothing.  But most of us think that our doing does matter, and that doing some things matters more than others.

For our lives to matter, our lives must matter to someone, or something, beyond ourselves.  “Who cares?” is the question.  Or perhaps, “What cares?”

That our decisions about what we choose to do with our lives are important decisions, requires that there be a moral standard of better or worse to judge our choices against.  Why is it better to teach elementary school than play video games?  Or maybe it isn’t.  The spiritual question is, “Why?”

Where these questions lead is the sense that there is a greater purpose to the unfolding of the universe that encompasses our individual lives and so when we judge an action as valuable, worthy, morally good, it is because we are acting in a manner that furthers that greater goal.  Our best purpose in our individual lives is to help that larger thing achieve its larger purpose.  Our lives matter because we have the ability to contribute to that larger goal.  Without our contribution that thing larger than us that we care about and which cares about us might miss its larger goal or be delayed.  The answer to, “What should I do?” is that we should live in a way that furthers the progress of the divine element of the universe toward fulfilling its holy aim.

That is using our lives to their best purpose.

But this leads to two questions.

The first is, what is that larger purpose?  What is the holy aim we are called to align our lives with?

I’ll return to that in a moment, but the second question is how are we humans best able to contribute to achieving the divine goal?  Does reaching the goal require lots of human effort, or, given our tendency to screw things up royally, would the goal be more quickly reached the less we do?

Is it better to do, or to be?

Here, unfortunately, the world’s spiritual wisdom is contradictory.

Taoism tells us that we do too much.  The better path is to relax and not strive against the natural flow of the universe.

Jesus tells us to get busy:  feed the hungry, clothe the naked, release the prisoner, and he didn’t add, “unless you’re retired.”

Many orders of Christian monks and nuns will tell you that their prayer in their cloisters is their best contribution to the health of the world.

The Buddha found salvation by sitting under a tree.  That sounds nice.  On the other hand, after he found salvation, he stood up and got to work.

Protestant Christian theology tells us that salvation is entirely by God’s grace and nothing we can do will help.  But the book of James from the Christian scriptures, that we read in our Responsive Reading asks, “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works?  Can faith save you?”  And then James answers, “Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.” 

            Working for salvation, or getting out of the way so salvation can find its own way, what’s the better choice?

You, apparently, thought the best choice you could make for your life this morning was to come to church.  Maybe now you’re having second thoughts.

            What does the larger thing, which enfolds us but also reaches beyond us, want from us:  our doing or our being?  And what does it want for itself:  what is the holy aim?

Let me pause to say that the “larger thing” I’m talking about could be different for each of us.  Spirituality requires that you recognize something larger than your own ego that you owe your allegiance to, but that can be many things.

            Perhaps that larger thing is God, if you’re inclined toward theism.  Or it could be the community of human beings, or all sentient beings, or all living things.  Or the larger thing might be the earth, or the universe.  Truly, even something barely larger than yourself will suffice as an entry to spirituality.  You and your family are larger than yourself alone.  You and a pet.

            The question is, what beyond yourself are you living for?  And then, naming that thing, loving that thing, wanting to help that thing flourish and fulfill itself, what does that thing larger than you, but including you, ask you to do, or is simply being, enough?

            Does it ask you to be still, to pray, to mediate, to sit beneath a tree and breathe, or to stand like a tree, and simply be?

            Or does it ask you to work like Hell?  To serve, to help, to tackle the problems of the world and do the work necessary to fix them?

            Or what if, as the point of those quotes from Satre, Camus and Sinatra say, doing and being are not opposites but aspects of the same?

To be is to do.  Sitting in the lotus posture I’m doing the act of sitting, meditating.  The tree standing in the forest has its being in the doingness of growing.  As John Soos notes:  “the restlessness of being a seed…the struggle toward the light… the joy of bursting and bearing fruit.”

To do is to be.  There I am, serving at the soup kitchen.  There I am at the elementary school.  That moment of working is my existence.

The holy place we sang of in our Opening Hymn includes both doing and being, “Telling our story from deep inside, listening with a loving mind, hearing our voices in each other’s words” and also, the still “silence of sacred space.”

The wholeness of rest and work, as Kathleen McTigue said in our Chalice Lighting words, “in this great and astonishing dance in which we move.”

            If being implies doing and vice versa, then the answer to the question of what does the larger thing want from me, may not be simply work or rest, but that can be accomplished through either doing or being.  What is accomplished from both the doing of work and the being of rest?

            To return now to that question left unanswered, if we work and rest, both, in service to that goal…

            Work, for what?

            Rest, for what?

            Imagining a divine goal, you might think of some great good like those that were named in the hymn Malcolm sang for us as our prelude:  “a firm commitment to the goal of justice, freedom, peace for all.”

            But I think those great goods only get us part way there.  Justice for what, after all?  Freedom for what?  Peace for what?  

            Christian theology names three transcendentals:  the good, the true, the beautiful.  But why be good?  What does knowing and telling the truth help us do?  Beauty for what?

            Even love is not quite the answer.  What does love give to us?  How does love improve our lives?  What is love for?

            The answer, I propose, is Joy.

            The universe wants joy.

            The earth wants our joy

            God wants your joy.

            Deep, satisfying, ecstatic, full-feeling and fulfilling, joy.  The largest joy you can have for yourself and the most joy you can make for others.

            The great joy John Soos described as, “the joy of bursting and bearing fruit”  But the kind of deep joy of the fulness of living, both doing and being, that includes all the moves of the dance of life:  “restlessness,” “struggle,” even “the pain of growth.”  Even the giving out and the decay of later stages of life is part of the deep joy the universe wants for us and wants from us.

            The purpose of doing and the salvation of being, is to do joy and to be joy.

            Can I get an amen?

            What your larger thing than your ego alone wants is your joy.  And so the particular doing that you are called to do with your life is the thing that brings joy to you.

            Not just your selfish pleasure, but your soul-expanding joy.

            If it creates joy in you, then the joy of the universe is increased.  If you make joy in others, then the joy of the universe is increased.

            Why should we clothe the naked and feed the hungry?  For joy.  Why should we work to liberate the oppressed?  For joy.

            Why should we praise God and sing hymns?  For joy.

            Why should we dance in the forest, and love our neighbor, and paint beautiful paintings, and write short stories and cook amazing dinners for our friends?  For joy.  Because our doing is joyful.  Because it makes our being joyful.

            Could it be as simple as that?

Shouting, “Bingo!” or the simple act of shuffling your walker down the hall to be with other people, makes joy.  My father certainly moves the universe toward joy when he shares in the lives of his children and grandchildren.  Seven year olds and babies certainly move the universe toward joy, even if they produce no tangible thing.

That is enough.

Working for thirty years, if it makes for joy for yourself or for others (hopefully for you), is enough.  If you’re watching game shows, or having brunch, do it for joy.  If you’re taking a walk, or planting seeds in the garden, or volunteering at the church, or going back to work again because you just can’t stand the boredom of retirement, well do it for joy, and that’s enough.

Work joy.  Rest joy.  Live joy.  Dance joy.  Sing joy.

Do be do be do.